The renewable energy revolution is in full swing, writes Jeremy Leggett, with costs falling to new lows, deployment of wind and solar surging to unprecedented highs, and confidence ebbing away from fossil fuels. But global warming is also accelerating, with global temperature records broken every month for a year. Will the energy transition happen in time to avert catastrophe?
The renewable energy revolution is in full swing, writes Jeremy Leggett, with costs falling to new lows, deployment of wind and solar surging to unprecedented highs, and confidence ebbing away from fossil fuels. But global warming is also accelerating, with global temperature records broken every month for a year. Will the energy transition happen in time to avert catastrophe?
World records tumbled in renewable energy last month.
Utilities, facing short-term existential threat in the face of clean-energy growth, continued to wrestle with the imperative of escaping the energy incumbency.
Oil and gas companies, facing longer term threat to business-model viability, read dire assessments of their prospects in places they could not have imagined possible until recently.
Investors continued to awaken to climate risk, and a critical mass of governments stayed broadly on course for the current and future action that the Paris Agreement requires of them.
None of this, however, happened as fast as the recent run of world-record monthly average temperatures merits. Unprecedented wildfires and die offs of coral reefs were harsh reminders this month of the race against time that civilization is running.
Continue reading at ENN affiliate, The Ecologist.
Energy system image credit: Nenad Kajić
